Beijing steps up online war against dissidents and the West
The call was supposed to be from her father. But when a Chinese activist who fled her country turned on the video chat she was confronted by a police officer. For 90 minutes, the uniformed officer – who had hauled her father into the station and used his phone to ring – berated her for mocking Chinese Communist Party leader Xi Jinping on Twitter, demanded she delete the account, and goaded her to give up the password. At one point, he leaned in: “I’m telling you the truth. Even though you are over there [in Australia], you are still subject to the laws of China, and under our jurisdiction.” “They said I’m a ‘foreign hostile force,’ and that I should go back to China and turn myself in,” she told The Sunday Telegraph. While the dissident living in Australia who uses the pseudonym Horror Zoo hadn’t revealed her real identity online, Chinese authorities managed to trace her social media activity to figure out who her parents were. Police have been harassing them weekly since April in an attempt to get her to stop criticising Mr Xi online – comments that would get someone in trouble in China, and be quickly censored. Through her parents, officers have called her twice, recordings of which she shared with the Telegraph.
